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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

The author talks about http servers. So I will throw a question here.

I am a gopher that wanted to try rust, and I looked into http servers in rust, and it looks like there is like 10 different http servers, and each of them carries with them something that is called “async runtime”, and there are different async runtimes, and you cannot (or can?) use them together, and I realized async rust is not yet finished (or it is?), and I got kind of lost.

What http servers people used? Do the asynch runtimes matter? If I want to “just” build a http server, do I need to study different async runtimes?

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Pretty much all the http servers of worth, short of tide, just use Tokio at this point.

For the most part, you really only need to care about Tokio. async-rs is used by some libraries, but it's relatively small in comparison - and many now go to lengths to just support both. There are other runtimes you could tinker with, but really: just use Tokio.

The "easiest" web server/framework to get started with in 2023 is, in my opinion, Axum. It's from the same people who work on Tokio and it does make it somewhat straightforward to dive into as a result.

I have a few actix-web servers in production as well, and it's a fine framework - hard to say where the mindshare falls on it these days.

Rocket is a very nice web framework but effectively has a bus factor of 1 at this point and it's started to show. People coming from e.g Rails may appreciate it though.

Don't use warp (IMO) because http routing is not rocket science and doesn't need the amount of magic it tries to bolt on.

Have fun.

I mean, there's only one http server people actually use, which is hyper. Just like in go where everyone uses net/http, even though fasthttp and so on exist and everyone just ignores them.

Just like in go, there's also a lot of web frameworks built on top of it (like all the ones listed here for go: https://github.com/mingrammer/go-web-framework-stars)

Just like in go, you can choose not to use any if you want and use hyper directly, or use one that is a quite thin layer on top of hyper like axum.

In terms of async runtimes, just pick tokio and get on with your life. It's the default choice, so picking it is the simplest option.

Async is really painful and a "not finished yet" thing.

However, in practice, if you use Tokio you should be fine. And usually this decision will be made for you with the framework you pick.

My #1 tip is to decide on exactly what your use case is, then use cargo and look at the recent number of downloads and go with the most popular framework. Doing this for several tags (http, server, framework) is required for categories that are noisy or not tagged well.

Example: Are you writing a web service API, a web server that has server-side templates, a client-side SPA app, or a server-less function?

Usually you will see they are all aligning on the same stack tokio, serde, etc but this is definitely something to be aware of. It is critical that an application uses the same version of dependencies for cross cutting concerns.

> async rust is not yet finished (or it is?)

https://areweasyncyet.rs/